The Great Prisons

In these days of Prisons by Profit, where private companies run incarceration facilities with all the souless motivations of a factory, it's easy to forget that history has produced some amazing jails and dungeons, whose reputation for brutality, control and utter architectural hopelessness has exceeded even the lifetime of the prison itself. From the "unescapable" fortresses where the harshest of criminals were held to the romantic stone-and-turret affairs of old, there's something about a really good lockdown that makes the heart soar. Here are some of the more memorable ones.